Ghost Stories and Mysteries (19 page)

I must have dreamt that I was fighting alligators at the mouth of the Albert River, and that a fearful splashing was going on; at least, that was the impression under which I drowsily came to my senses.

The splashing still continued, however, and came from the lagoon.

‘One of the horses has got in and can’t get out,’ was my first thought, and I jumped up and went in the direction of the sound. All was still when I reached the bank, and by the light of the stars the surface appeared placid and unruffled. Then, for the first time, a superstitious thrill went through me, but I soon shook it off, and, after listening a little longer, I returned to my camp, renewed the fire, and went to see if my horses were all right. The tinkle of the bell in the distance guided me to them; and I found them feeding greedily and contentedly. I remained with them during the time I smoked the heel of a pipe just to get myself into a proper ‘daylight’ frame of mind, then went back to my blankets.

It was a little while ‘ere I went off to sleep, for an owl gave me a start by suddenly commencing to bark right over my head. However, I did drop off and dreamt a very strange dream, I call it a dream, but to me it seemed real enough at the time.

I was awakened, so I thought, once more by the splashing, but this time I had somehow no inclination to inquire into the cause of it. Presently it ceased, and I heard something come stumbling towards my camp. Still I felt neither fear nor any desire to move. The object came into the circle of light and squatted by the fire.

It was an elderly white man, with a remarkably long, grey beard. He was bare-headed, and his shirt and trousers were wet through and clung to him. But that was not all. His head and beard were covered with blood, one eye had been smashed in, and spear-wounds were visible in his cheeks and neck. As to his body, one could not tell, but his shirt was blood-soaked, and the blood dripped from his wrists as he held his hands towards the fire. It was not until I had fully taken in all those details and the hideously gashed face, with its one eye, looked at me across the fire, that terror—unreasoning terror—overmastered me. Then I felt an impulse to yell and jump up, but I was dumb and powerless. The thing arose, and glaring at me with its single eye, suddenly rang a furious peal on a horse-bell.

This broke the charm. I started up; it was broad daylight, the horses had fed back close to camp, and the one with the bell on was just giving himself a vigorous shake.

* * * * * * *

‘What’s the yarn about the Red Lagoon?’ I asked Jack Sullivan, the super of the station, where I camped next night.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there is a yarn about it, and a very stupid one, too. Why do you ask, you camped there last night. See anything?’

I told him I had been awakened by some mysterious splashing in the lagoon.

‘Fish. Lots of big ones there; always jump on dark nights. This is the yarn, some of it, of course,
is
true—it’s a matter of history: You know, this country was settled early in the sixties, and afterwards abandoned; all the stations thrown up and the district deserted. This run was one of them, although the old homestead was in a different place. There was a deuce of a lot of ‘dispersing,’ and cattle-killing going on, and the then manager and some others caught a lot of blacks—all sorts and sexes—at the Red Lagoon, and made short work of the crowd. The blacks, of course, took to the water and were most of them shot in it. Now comes in the embroidery. The lagoon was said to have been quite clear then and has since become covered with the red weed that gives it its name. A natural process I have often witnessed where no one has been killed.

‘The super, an elderly man, was afterwards killed by the blacks when camped at the same place. Some of them have since confessed that he took to the water and that they hunted him from side to side until he died. Anyhow, it’s true that he was found half in the water, with his head and face frightfully battered, and spear wounds all over. From what I know of them I should say that he was knocked on the head when asleep, and that they then chopped him about and threw his body in the lagoon.’

‘Do the blacks ever camp there now?’

‘No. But that is not singular. They nearly always shun a place where they have murdered a white man. I know of many instances.’

THE TRACK OF THE DEAD

(1892)

“What’s the matter with you; why the deuce can’t you sleep?”

“I don’t know,” returned Alf; “got a touch of insomnia to-night. If I do go to sleep I have the most awful dreams all about men I used to know, men who are dead now.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t start such talk at this time of night. Sit by the fire and smoke your pipe quietly,” I answered, wearily, as I turned my back to the blaze and drew my blanket around me.

“Right you are, old man,” he replied, good-naturedly, and I dropped off into unconsciousness.

I awoke with a start. The fire was out, or nearly so, and the camp was silent. Just above the horizon the spectral last quarter of the moon was hanging, throwing ghostly, dim, long shadows around. It was the hour before dawn, the uncanny hour when all the vital forces are at the lowest ebb. Some great general is reported to have said, that the only courage worth a hang was three o’clock in the morning courage. Whether anyone ever did make the remark or not, there is a deal of truth in it.

I roused myself a little and looked around. Alf was sleeping on the other side of the fire, and where he had set his bed down was now in deep shadow, and I could make nothing out. I tried to go to sleep again, but it was useless. Perhaps a smoke might send me off; so, seeing a spark still smouldering, I arose, and blowing the end of a still glowing firestick into a blaze, I lit my pipe, and then, holding the lighted stick up, looked over to where my companion should have been sleeping.

His blankets were tenantless.

May I never experience again such an uncomfortable thrill as went through me when I made this discovery! I put my hand on the blankets where they had been thrown aside. They were cold and the dew had gathered on them; he must have been gone some hours. I listened long and intently, but the night was silent. For a man to wander away from camp in the middle of the night, out in the Never-Never spinifex country, and remain away for hours, is a most uncanny thing. If he had heard the horses making off he would have called me ere leaving; if—but I exhausted all conjectures before daylight dawned. I could do nothing until then.

The light came very slowly, or so it appeared to me. We were camped at the foot of a spinifex rise, on a narrow flat bordering a creek. When the light was strong I could see the horses feeding quietly some short distance away, and picking up my bridle I soon had one caught and saddled, and firing off my rifle two or three times without eliciting an answering shot, I started to look for my missing mate. After some trouble I picked up his track leading straight up the ridge, which, near the crest, was sandy, and the prints of his footsteps were clearly defined. The spinifex was scantier here, and as I gazed intently down I saw something that made me pull up and hastily dismount to scan the tracks closer. Alf, was not alone, somebody was walking ahead of him.

Step by step I followed leading my horse, but I could make nothing of the foremost track, for Alf’s almost covered it every time. At last they diverged, and the two ran side by side. It was a bright morning, the sun just glinting under the stunted trees; what little live nature there was in that lonely spot was awake and joyously greeting the day; but I rose up from my examination of that awful foot-mark with the dew of superstitious terror on my forehead. No living man had made that track.

I had to follow on scarce knowing what to think or expect. I tried to persuade myself that the foot-print was that of some attenuated old gin, lean and shrunken as a mummy, but that was against reason. The track was that of the skeleton of a man; and Alf was not following it, but following whatever was making it.

With varying fortune, now finding, now losing the trail I kept on for about two hours; then, halfway down a slight incline, I came upon the object of my search. He was sitting on the ground talking to himself, I thought at first, but when I got closer I saw he was addressing some object on his lap. He was nursing the head and shoulders of the remains of a human being. He lay at full length amidst a patch of rank green grass fertilised by the decayed body, a skeleton with fragments of rotten clothing still clinging to it. Alf had his arm under the skull as one would support a sick man, and was murmuring words of affection. He raised his head as I approached but evinced no surprise.

“This is my brother Jack;” he said. “Fancy his coming to the camp last night to show me where he was. We must take him into the nearest station and bury him, for he can’t rest here, it’s too lonely.”

I could not answer. Alf’s mind had evidently given way and I could not reason with him. He carried the body back to our camp and I commenced a ghastly ride to the nearest station over seventy miles away, with a madman and a corpse for companions. The third day after starting we arrived at Ulmalong, then the outside station, and here I learnt the story of Alf’s twin brother.

He had been a stockman on the place when it was first settled, and had ridden out on his rounds one day and never returned. There was little doubt that the skeleton we brought in was his, but what led the living twin to its resting place? I held my tongue about the track for they would only think I was as mad as poor Alf.

After we buried the remains Alf relapsed into almost constant silence. He was quite harmless and they found him some light work to do about the place, but he died, prematurely aged, in about a year’s time. He was buried with his brother.

BLOOD FOR BLOOD

(1892)

Silence everywhere, the spell of heat on everything. Kites, which had been soaring on strong pinions away back in the dry country, swooping down on the grasshoppers, have had to come in to this lonely waterhole tired out and worried; and now sit dozing on the branches of the motionless coolibah. One who had left it too long has had only sufficient strength to reach the water and flounder in, and stands with bedraggled feathers moping at the edge of the muddy pool. There is no animal nor human life to be seen—just a round clay hole, a few withered polygonum bushes, and some gnarled and warped coolibah trees. Around lies a bare plain with a bewildering heat-mist hovering over it.

The slow, hot hours creep on. The sodden kite standing near the water suddenly topples over and falls dead; at times one of the others flops heavily down from its perch, takes a few sips and flies back again. These are the only sounds, the only living movements that break the stagnant monotony.

There is neither track of man nor beast to be seen, but for all that what was once a man is lying there beneath one of the shadeless trees. It has been lying there for over six months, so there is nothing very repulsive about the poor corpse but its shrivelled likeness to humanity. When it staggered in there alive the hole was dry, and it sank down and died. Since then a quick and angry thunderstorm has passed and partly filled the hole, too late. But no prowling dog has found the body, not even the venturesome crow has been to inspect it; the desert has protected it from white tooth and black beak, and it lies there dry and withered, but the form of a man—and a white man, still.

This is the story of that unburied, unwept, untended corpse. It is a story of thirst, of treachery, of revenge.

Years ago, when stations were valuable and all things pastoral looked bright ahead, three men pushed out beyond the bounds of settlement in search of new country. Two of them were fast friends, although there was a considerable difference in their ages. The third was simply on the footing of ordinary friendship and of about the same age as the elder of the other two. The party was completed by a black boy.

Far beyond the lonely water-hole where the weary kites sit watching the silent dead, they came on to good country—fair, rolling downs and deep permanent holes. At one of these they fixed a camp and inspected the country on all sides with a view of dividing the runs fairly. One day the younger of the two friends and the third man went out together. They took a long excursion northward and finding no water, made, the next day, for a small hole they had passed on their way out. Fatal mistake—the hole was dry, with the body of a misled dingo rotting at the bottom, and with thirsty, tired horses, and nearly empty bags, they were now fifty miles from their camp, the nearest water.

They turned out for a short spell and lay down to catch a few moments of slumber. The young man slept soundly, dreaming of long, cool swims in a river; of watching it sparkling and leaping amongst the rocks; then he awoke suddenly to find himself companionless in the desert. He raised himself on his elbow and looked around. The clear starlight showed him nothing; he was actually alone; his mate and all the horses were gone. He went to where they had hung the water-bags on a tree. They were gone, too. He comprehended it all. His treacherous friend had taken the two freshest horses and the remnant of the water, and started for the camp, trusting that one would get there where two could not. The other two horses had probably followed of their own accord, to die in their tracks.

He had no hope that his companion meant to come back with succour. A man who could do such a deed would never suffer his victim to bear witness against him. He had the choice of two deaths—a lingering one where he was, or a quicker one in a desperate attempt to gain the camp. He chose the latter. He had no expectation that his own old friend would come to his relief, for he guessed he would be deceived by some specious lie.